A Delicate Balance

Tadao Ando, a refined craftsman, builds big in Texas.

The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth is an architectural masterpiece. It was completed in 1972, just two years before its designer, Louis Kahn, died, and it has become probably the most revered museum design of the second half of the twentieth century. The Kimbell isn't very large, but a move to expand it a few years ago was beaten back by those who believe that Kahn's composition of travertine walls and concrete vaults washed by natural light is so close to perfect that it should be left alone.

In 1996, the trustees of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth acquired an eleven-acre site across the street from the Kimbell and commissioned the Japanese architect Tadao Ando to design a new building for them. This was a little like asking someone to put up a church next door to Chartres. The commission seemed even more daunting because Ando, who is sixty-one years old, had never taken on a major public building in the United States, although he had designed a small private museum for the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, which was completed last year, and a house in Chicago. Ando's work is refined and restrained. It has an austere delicacy that seemed unsuited to a large-scale project.

In fact, Ando has much in common with Louis Kahn. Both are masters of concrete and know how to coax a sense of spirituality out of harsh materials. They have both made something of a fetish of natural light, and both have an almost visceral repugnance toward frivolity and commercialism. Ando's new building opened this month. It is taller and wider than the Kimbell, but its expansiveness is not the reason it has become the dominant presence in the Fort Worth Cultural District, which also includes the Amon Carter Museum, by Philip Johnson, and the Will Rogers Memorial Center, a sprawling, vaguely Art Deco auditorium. The Kimbell is the work of a brilliant, highly self-conscious master. It is small and dense, and you sense Kahn's anguish in the building. Ando's swaggering new Modern, on the other hand, has a kind of easy poise.

For much of his career, Ando, who was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1995, has synthesized Western modern architecture with a Japanese sensibility, and he has taken the synthesis to a new level here. The traditional Japanese controlled landscape with a courtyard garden has been blown up to Texas scale. Ando's Modern is shaped roughly like a fat, bulky L, and it faces two streets, from both of which it looks like a sprawling box sheathed in aluminum panels with vertical fins, set underneath a flat, overhanging roof. A parking lot separates the building from the streets—perhaps a reticent number of parking spaces by Texas standards, but still too much for the building. A tall, curving sculpture by Richard Serra stands at the corner of the lot. You could easily mistake the place for some corporation's headquarters.

But then you enter the building and all is forgiven. Actually, you don't even have to go in. As you approach the main entrance, where the aluminum gives way to glass, you can see a huge, two-story lobby crossed by a concrete bridge, with an acre and a half of lagoon on the other side. The landscape around the lagoon is a rolling lawn punctuated by trees. Three rectangular glass pavilions appear to float on the lagoon, as does an oval-shaped glass café. Unlike Kahn, who made a quiet exterior to house a jewel-box interior, Ando has used a quiet exterior to mask what is really another set of exteriors, turned away from the street. It's an extraordinary space, at once tranquil and exhilarating.

Of course, Fort Worth is not Kyoto, and there are problems. For instance, a yellow-and-blue billboard promoting a local personal-injury lawyer glares over a wall separating Ando's meticulously crafted landscape from the street. (“Well, that's probably a pretty lucrative billboard,” a museum spokesperson said to me when I asked about it.) Then again, the Japanese have always been skillful at tuning out the garishness of contemporary life. Ando's response to Fort Worth sprawl is neither to embrace it nor to try to destroy it but simply not to see it when it interrupts his line of vision. The Japanese have also traditionally made much of what they call “borrowed scenery,” or attractive distant vistas, and the Modern has plenty of borrowed scenery as well. Some of it is along the lines of the billboard, but since the cultural district that contains the Kimbell and the Modern is on a slight rise about a mile from downtown Fort Worth, there are enticing views of the skyline.

Many of Ando's early sketches for the Modern, which are now on display in the lobby, show his building in relation to Kahn's, but Ando is too strong an architect to pay homage by copying, and there are only two places in the new building where you sense that he is evoking Kahn. One is a vaulted ceiling that loosely echoes the shape of the Kimbell ceilings, and the other is a rounded concrete wall (actually the end of an elliptical gallery) that looks very much like a concrete stairwell in one of Kahn's other celebrated buildings, the Yale Center for British Art.

Not the least of the virtues of Ando's building is how well organized it is. You walk into the large, formal lobby, and the entire layout is apparent: museum shop to the left; auditorium to the right; lagoon straight ahead, with the café visible at the right side of the water and the pavilions jutting out to the left. The pavilions, which contain elegantly proportioned glass-enclosed galleries, are covered with concrete roofs that extend over the water on three sides and are supported by unusual, Y-shaped concrete pillars. The pillars could be considered abstract trees, or human figures with raised arms, but I doubt that is what the architect had in mind. I suspect that he was just making sure that the vista across the water was not static. He need not have worried. The water ripples in the wind, and the light changes it, so that one moment it is reflecting the architecture and the next distorting it. This is hardly the first building to be set against a reflecting pool—Ando uses the trick all the time, and so have plenty of Western architects—but it feels new here. Ando is brilliant at inventing ways to make you experience the connection between the building and the water not just from the outside but also from within. For example, at one end of the main galleries there is what appears to be a corridor leading to a stair, but as you move along the solid wall it becomes glass and you discover that you are gently descending toward the water, almost being set into it.

Ando's galleries are not tucked into leftover space, as they are in so many museums of the previous generation. They are gracious, clear, generous, and varied. A few of them are two stories high, but they never feel overwhelming, and there are enough intimate areas for exhibiting smaller pieces. Most of the galleries on the second floor are lit by natural light. There is fifty-three thousand square feet of gallery space spread over the main body of the building and the pavilions, making this one of the largest museums of modern art in the country.

Michael Auping, the museum's chief curator, installed its admirable collection with great sensitivity to Ando's architecture. Putting Anselm Kiefer's vast lead-tin-and-steel sculpture “Book with Wings” all by itself in a small, concrete-walled, elliptical gallery and Andy Warhol's chilling green-and-black “Self Portrait” of 1986 at the top of the main staircase is the kind of thing that can be done only by a strong-willed curator who feels confident about working with a strong-willed architect. Ando has described the galleries as “concrete volumes encased in a glass-skin box,” and Auping's brilliant eye for hanging art in them is particularly evident in the three pavilions over the lagoon. The concrete walls don't come right up to the glass. Room was left for a walkway between the concrete and the glass, and when you are strolling along you can't decide whether you are in a cathedral ambulatory or on a pier. There is a single piece of art at the end of each pavilion: a thin sculpture by Cy Twombly in one, a set of steel panels by Carl Andre in another, and a Michelangelo Pistoletto sculpture of an Etruscan figure against a mirror in the third. One piece holds the center of its space, another anchors the floor, and the other engages the wall. All three occupy less of the gallery than you might expect them to, and each comes as a surprise.

Many museums these days look their best before any art is installed in them. This is the first great museum building in a generation that gets even better when art is added. ♦